My father’s folks were both immigrants from Denmark, a tiny Scandinavian country on a peninsula north of Germany that had only 3 million people back in the early 1900s, with almost a quarter of them settled near the capital, the port city of Copenhagen. Denmark is probably best known for being the home of famous fairy-tale author Hans Christian Andersen, who viewed himself as the original ugly duckling. His friends didn’t exactly rush to dissuade him from this notion, nor the local women to declare themselves. One friend described Andersen as a “long, thin, fleshless, boneless man, wriggling and bending like a lizard with a lantern-jawed cadaverous visage.” Once again, great angst becomes great art.
Dad’s mother, Betty Nora Andersen, was born in Jutland, the largest of the three main islands that make up the country of Denmark. In the early 1920s, she was working as a shampoo girl at a Copenhagen barbershop owned by Grandpa’s father, and that’s where they met.
My grandfather, Peder Hjalmar Ingerman Pedersen, was born in Copenhagen in 1902. Like my father and me, he was also an only child, but this was a result of his four older sisters’ deaths during infancy. As to being Peder Pedersen, that’s a popular joke that Scandinavians play on their kids—Nils Nilsson, Lars Larson, John Johnson. The son or sen at the end of the last name means “son of.”
As was the custom in most Danish working-class families at the time, Grandpa left school upon completing the eighth grade. At age twelve, he took a job as a baggage boy in the Copenhagen railroad station. The “war to end all wars” (we weren’t yet savvy or cynical enough to start numbering them) was under way, and Denmark, which remained neutral, was a hub of wartime activity. Grandpa earned so much money in tips that he planned to retire by the age of twenty.
However, World War I came to a close when he was sixteen, the rail station fell silent in postwar hard times, and Grandpa took a job as a waiter in a local restaurant. A waiters’ union existed in most European countries back then, and his was soon called to go on strike when an establishment in Copenhagen gave two women jobs serving tables (oh, horrors!).
After being unemployed for several months, and uninterested in working at the barbershop, Grandpa headed down to the docks and took a waiter position aboard a steamship. He was dating my grandmother, so they had to curtail their romance while she stayed behind in the hair salon and he went off to seek his fortune.
The ship took Grandpa to Paris, where he found work in the kitchen of a hotel restaurant. He didn’t speak a word of French, but was a hearty young man about six feet tall, with so much wavy brown hair on top that it balanced out a somewhat overly large nose on an otherwise handsome face.
On the first day at his new job, Grandpa was given the task of delivering a room-service tray. He was surprised to find two young, nubile French women lying naked atop their beds. They giggled at his embarrassment, tipped generously, and said to return when he was off duty. After a typical Scandinavian upbringing (to call it conservative would be like saying that pickled herring is slightly fishy), Grandpa decided he was going to like France very much. However, that afternoon, when the dumbwaiter came up and the chef shouted “Chaud!” (hot), Grandpa picked up the tray and promptly dropped it back down the chute and onto the chef’s head. So ended Paris. Grandpa was sent packing and returned to the shipyard looking for work.
A steamer was bound for Cuba, where the crew would take on enormous sea turtles and lash them to the deck for the purpose of being made into ladies shoes and handbags back in the States. It was the beginning of the Jazz Age, and Americans who craved exotic food and fashion from all over the world were willing to pay dearly to get it. One of Grandpa’s jobs was to pour buckets of water over the turtles to keep them alive during the long voyage. He particularly liked the port of Havana because you could roll up a dollar, tie it with string, and lower it over the side of the ship, whereupon a rowboat would magically appear and a boy would replace the bill with a bottle of rum.
***
When Grandpa’s ship docked in Hoboken, New Jersey, he hopped off and lit out for the smorgasbord tables of Manhattan. From an immigration standpoint, his timing was perfect. The economy was going gangbusters, and America welcomed industrious newcomers, especially from Europe. An immigrant was able to wash ashore and apply for first papers, which almost guaranteed citizenship.
It was 1923 and horses and buggies were still as prevalent on New York City streets as automobiles. Not that Grandpa could afford either a carriage or a Model T, since he started life in the United States with only five dollars in his pocket.
Telephones, elevators, and central heating, all still relatively new, were found only in the mansions of the wealthy, such as those owned by industrialists like the Carnegies, Astors, and Vanderbilts. These robber barons turned blue bloods had been clever enough to make their millions before the advent of income tax in 1913.
The poor were less fortunate, especially when one considered the circumstances in which most lived and worked. On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in the heart of Manhattan (now the area known as Greenwich Village) resulted in the deaths of 146 workers, mostly young women, because doors were kept locked by management to control the labor force. Probably one of the worst workplace disasters since the start of the Industrial Revolution, this tragedy brought national attention to labor exploitation, particularly the treatment and compensation of women toiling away in sweatshops. As a result, workers organized into powerful unions that would protect their rights and promote safe working conditions.
Women were also agitating to participate in their so-called democracy. After substantial groundwork, begun most notably by Elizabeth Cady Stanton back in the 1840s and taken up by Susan B. Anthony, women were finally granted the right to vote in 1919 with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. (Neither suffragette lived to see her dream become a reality.) Some cities instituted a rule that voters had to state their age to enter the polls, with the hope that vanity would keep women at home. No such luck.
Once settled in Manhattan, Grandpa took jobs in Scandinavian restaurants, the precursors to the all-you-can-eat buffet. Only instead of shrimp and roast beef, the specialties were Norwegian yellow-pea soup, Havarti and Jarlsberg on pumpernickel, smoked eel and mackerel, medisterpølse (Danish pork sausage), reindeer meatballs, and forloren skildpadde (mock turtle stew), all washed down with a strong, clear liquor called aquavit. For dessert there was lingonberry pie, almond fingers, raisin meringue, and gingered apple ring.
Between waiter jobs, Grandpa lived on bunches of bananas and went to the movies all day since both cost only a nickel. In 1990, when he saw the book New York on $25 a Day, he laughed and said that he’d often done New York on less than twenty-five cents a day. In 1930, Grandpa would get lunch at the Automat and then stand on the corner of Thirty-Third Street and Sixth Avenue watching the Empire State Building rise above the skyline. Mohawk Indians known as “skywalkers” worked fearlessly along narrow steel beams fifty stories in the air. For the most part, times were good, and Grandpa eventually saved enough to marry his sweetheart back in Denmark.
Immigration laws continued to tighten in the late twenties, and Grandma wasn’t able to enter the United States for another year. When she finally arrived in Manhattan, Grandma perfected her English by copying songs from church hymnals. Like so many Scandinavians, they were Lutheran, which is still the official religion of Denmark.
In appearance, Grandma was slender and quick-moving, like a bird. She was the same age as the Swedish-born film star Greta Garbo and bore an amazing resemblance to the stunning screen actress. People constantly stopped her on the Manhattan subway, mistaking her for Garbo, who was by then famous for such movies as Queen Christina and Camille. Though one wonders if passengers didn’t think it odd that the great Garbo would be slumming as a straphanger on the A train.
During the thirties, Grandma began investing in the stock
market—companies like IBM, Pepsi-Cola, General Motors, American Tobacco, and AT&T. It was the Depression
, and prices were low compared to their recent heyday in the twenties. Ledger entries show her buying shares at five-eighths and selling them a week later at seven-eighths, or buying at fourteen and one-quarter and selling a month later at eighteen. There were losses, but they were systematically cut and only about one-eighth the size of her gains.
Grandma was a day trader by 1930s’ housewife standards. Armed with only the newspaper, she bought and sold like a professional, letting profits run and cutting losses short. Though this sounds easy and commonsensical, it’s actually rather difficult, as any trader knows, because the practice goes against every natural instinct, like trying not to break a fall by outstretching your hands.
Grandma remained in the United States as a resident alien throughout her life and had to bicycle down to the post office and register every year. It’s a good thing that Denmark never declared war on the United States or she probably would’ve been sent to an internment camp and forced to design chairs. Worse, Americans might have been without Legos, purple-haired troll dolls, and butter cookies.
Speaking of war, the only fact about Denmark that still manages to make American high school history books is the phenomenal organization and heroic efforts of its resistance movement throughout World War II. Though the Nazis easily occupied this tiny country adjacent to Germany,
the powerful Danish underground managed to save about 7,200 of their 7,800 resident Jews from extermination by smuggling them out of the country, mostly by using small boats that carried them to neutral
Sweden. There was little time to prepare, and participants were without the benefit of blogs, e-mail, or cell phones that play customized ringtones.
For the past two centuries, the Danes have been viewed as a peaceful and progressive people—the first to prohibit slavery and make schooling compulsory and free. Like the wolves in Yellowstone National Park, they have no known natural predators that I’m aware of. However, the 2006 “cartoon scandal”—in which a Danish paper printed cartoons lampooning Islam—possibly altered that legacy.
Then there is the sedate Little Mermaid statue in the harbor, a symbol of Copenhagen drawn from a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. It has endured two beheadings, lost a right arm, been painted red, draped in a protest burka, and even blasted off the perch with dynamite.
***
Grandpa learned English by listening to people talk in restaurants and kitchens, and he never lost his Danish accent (think of Danish comedian/
pianist Victor Borge). Whenever I suggested that Grandpa teach me some Danish he’d say, “Why do you want to learn Danish? It’s a troat disease.” He eventually developed an unusual Danish-Brooklyn dialect that bore a remarkable resemblance to the last bit of bath-water going down the drain. Like many European immigrants, Grandpa couldn’t pronounce the “th” sound, thereby giving us words like tick instead of thick, tree instead of three, and turd instead of third. Or as Victor Borge liked to say about the matter, “To pronounce ‘th’ you need to stick your tongue out. Denmark is a cold country and you don’t want to stick out anything you can’t be sure you’ll get back in again.”
Unable to say the “j” sound very well, a “y” was slid in as a soft substitute. From speaking with Grandpa as a child I picked up some unusual pronunciations that were unwittingly carried into adulthood, such as yetty for jetty, yaywalking for jaywalking, and a person who couldn’t take criticism was said to be tin-skinned.
Grandpa only went back once to visit his parents in Denmark. He walked in the front door and scared his mother so badly with this surprise appearance that she said, “Don’t ever do that again.” He never did. Years later he heard that his father was in a nursing home in Copenhagen, blind and fond of starting happy hour at 5:00 am instead of the more traditional 5:00 pm. One afternoon, following a liquid lunch, my great-grandfather wandered outside and was killed by a streetcar.
Grandpa worked as a waiter into his eighties and only stopped temporarily when Grandma had a stroke and needed full-time care at home. Whereas she had always been miserable, even when healthy, throughout his long life Grandpa was easygoing and fun loving; he would twirl plates in the air like a circus juggler, spin teacups on saucers so they appeared on the brink of crashing to the floor, and make doves and skyscrapers out of napkins as if trained in Japanese origami.
Working as a waiter for sixty years had paid the bills, but nothing more. So, in retirement he was left with a modest Social Security income. However, Grandma’s stock investments had grown substantially from that initial outlay of $757.50 for one hundred shares of a small company called Radio Corporation, which later became RCA. And when she died in her early sixties, Grandma left Grandpa a nice portfolio.
Other than a bronze Camaro and his apartment, Grandpa didn’t purchase anything after Grandma died—quite the opposite. He threw away everything except the furniture and a place setting for one. Out went the linens, dishes, bric-a-brac, and anything else nonessential to daily life, thereby developing a new school of design best described as Danish monastic. When I lived with Grandpa while searching for an apartment in Manhattan, he was forced to borrow an extra plate and glass from a friend.
Grandpa was charming. Waitresses were forever giving him extra scoops of ice cream, and widows were always trying to get his phone number and sit next to him. He had twinkling blue eyes and a mane of thick white hair that women wanted to run their fingers through. As he grew older, the number of women pursuing him only increased, since there were fewer available men around. Even his optometrist, an attractive Danish woman, continued passing him on eye exams so that he could renew his driver’s license, right up until he died. Truth be told, on the DMV version of the eye exam, he’d only have received credit for identifying the building.
In his eighties, Grandpa once left the apartment at nine in the evening with a bottle of Cutty Sark tucked under his arm, saying he was off to assist a woman who’d asked him to translate a few letters written in Danish. Sometime after midnight I went to bed and Grandpa still wasn’t home.
The next morning I asked, “So, how were the letters?”
He smiled impishly and said, “There weren’t any letters.”
When Grandpa was eighty-eight years old, he went to the doctor and the man’s stethoscope practically fell off his neck; the office hadn’t heard from Grandpa in over ten years. That long-ago visit had been handled by the doctor’s father, who’d diagnosed Grandpa with lung cancer and then promptly passed away himself. After a certain length of time the office had closed Grandpa’s file.
“Do you smoke?” asked the stunned physician.
“No, I quit,” replied Grandpa.
“Excellent,” the doctor replied and wrote something on his chart. “How long did you smoke?”
Grandpa had to think for a moment and do some math. “Seventy years,” he finally answered.
Several months later, Grandpa enacted a typically Scandinavian death. One morning shortly before his eighty-ninth birthday he said, “Take me to the hospital. I’m done.”
He seemed okay to me. Maybe he meant that he was done with breakfast. “Done with what?” I asked.
“I did everything I wanted to do. The leaves to the dining room table are in the closet, my tax returns are in the desk drawer, and the keys to the car are on the TV.”
I took him to the hospital where the admissions person laughed in my face to hear his name was Peder Pedersen. No faker, Grandpa climbed in bed, closed his eyes, and refused everything but water. I said, “I’ll call Dad,” who was now living in New Mexico.
“No. I don’t want to bother him,” replied Grandpa.
“He’s retired. It’s not that big a bother.”
Dad arrived. Grandpa said hello and that he shouldn’t have bothered. Dad said it was no bother, and Grandpa died.
Five
Getting Up Your Irish…
Family Diversity…Three’s a Mob
While my father is 100 percent Danish, my mother’s ancestors hail from the Briti
sh Isles—a maltlike blend of Irish, Scottish, and English. In the great oral tradition of the Celts, even those with little schooling were able to recite epic poems, often in Greek or Latin. Certainly the damp and dark climate of industrial Western New York continued to foster this custom. Though we have no heath or bog in Buffalo, over 50 percent of the days are gray. Following in the footsteps of their gifted literary ancestors, many of Mom’s forebears became men of letters; more specifically, they became letter carriers employed by the post office.
My mother, Ellen Elizabeth Watson, was born January 2, 1937, and given the names of her two grandmothers. She has a brother, James Eugene Watson, who is ten months younger, commonly known as an Irish twin in Buffalo, and a sister, Sarah Frances, three years her junior.
Whereas Uncle Jim and Aunt Sue look more typically Irish, with wavy light hair and pink skin like their mother, Mary Frances Costello, Mom is black Irish in appearance, with dark curly hair, hazel eyes, and glass-of-milk skin. To see her as a young girl, pick up any copy of Anne Frank’s diary and consult the author photo on the cover. As an adult, her uncanny resemblance to England’s Queen Elizabeth I has been commented on by many people.
The most distinguishing feature about Mom is her natural Afro. She traces it back to the Spanish Armada, when part of the fleet was wrecked off the coast of Ireland. Once, when a gas pump malfunctioned and seven gallons of fuel sprayed her, the station attendant looked alarmed upon seeing Mom’s hair standing on end, thinking it was a result of the accident rather than her normal coiffure. Otherwise, she’s the only person I know with skin paler than mine and who can get burned by the moon on a cloudy night.
My maternal grandfather, Alexander Baker Watson, was a native of Buffalo but worked as an itinerant newspaperman. He certainly wasn’t constantly on the move because he had any difficulty finding stories. No, the trouble was that more often than not back in the phone-booth and fedora days, the truly good stories were about him rather than by him. Grandpa Watson was by all accounts a talented drinker with a writing problem, and this led to an endless round of hirings and firings.
Buffalo Gal Page 4